Peter Crisp wrote:Science fiction often contains references and entire plot devices for something called Subspace so does Subspace exist even in theory and if so can we somehow travel to it or through it? My example is Babylon 5 where ships fly though subspace which isn't in normal space and travel through it is massively faster.

Something like 'subspace' - an alternate space we could dip into where distances are shorter - doesn't really exist, as far as we can tell.

But, space is malleable: gravity operates by compressing and bending space. What might be possible is a form of the 'warp bubble' from Star Trek, where the space in front of a craft is compressed and the space behind expanded, pushing the craft along -- in a way that wouldn't involve any actual velocity, so wouldn't be limited by the speed of light. (This is called an Alcubierre drive). The JPL at NASA were conducting warp field tests using similar methods a few years ago; as far as I know their results were inconclusive and research is still ongoing.

Wormholes might also exist, if you could bend two very separate regions of space 'into' each other. Much like Star Trek's take on it (it really made some great predictions!), it would be at best extremely rare to find a stable wormhole in the wild, and extremely difficult to create one.

I actually don't think warp drives or wormholes are possible at all, because they both offer opportunities for time travel and I believe there are tantalising hints in the mathematics of quantum field theory and general relativity that our Universe simply doesn't work that way. (But I hear about those hints second-hand because I'm not a practising theoretical physicist, so my opinion should be taken with a pinch of salt!)

Ok so a wormhole is a bridge between 2 places connected by openings (that may or may not be black holes) so what are the tunnels flowing through? I realise depicting these things using our 3d representations is somewhat muddying things but they seem to be linked via a conduit that goes through something but is obviously not in our for want a a better term normal space so what are the tunnels in.

Right so in the diagram black hole 1 and 2 open into normal space the the conduit in between flows though something that seem to be not in space but something else if that makes any sense at all.

The answer is that space isn't bound by the rules of geometry and topology that we're used to.

The distance between two parallel straight lines doesn't change depending on how far along you look, right? And if you want to make a 2D shape out of straight lines you need a minimum of three of them, right? And the angles in any triangle always add up to 180 degrees, right?

Those three principles are all interconnected, and form the basis of our intuitive understanding of how objects, shapes, areas, and volumes work. None of them hold true near a black hole. Near a black hole, parallel straight lines diverge, you can make a shape out of two lines, and the angles of a triangle depends on how you construct the triangle.

This demonstrates that our inherent understanding of shapes can't be applied to space itself. We can't conceive intuitively of a wormhole without imagining space 'bending into itself' and that would require space to exist in an even larger space. The truth is that space can bend and twist without bending 'into' or twisting 'around' anything - it can expand without moving 'into something' and compress without getting 'smaller' - but we can't really imagine it because the geometry and topology of space is fundamentally different to the environment our minds evolved to visualise and model.

Massively depressing and frustrating that people like this Eddie Bravo gimp exist. Even worse that they have a platform to spread their nonesense.

I skipped to a random point in that and the guy was saying satellites and the space station are not real because you can't see a plane from the ground so how could you see a space station. The mars rover is a tax scam apparently. Couldn't watch any more on that, was boiling my piss. The ignorance of these banana splits.